Paper Session Chair: Solomiya Moroz
11:00h
Sketch, Draft and Refined Hypothesis Testing as a Creative Process in Audio Portraiture
Author: Maree Sheehan
Audio-portraiture describes a discrete, immersively experienced, audio rendering of an individual’s identity. Paradigmatically the development and creation of these audio portraits is informed by te ao Māori philosophies, knowledge and understandings. Within a process of reflective practice, I can trace the iterative development of my portraiture through three forms of experiments, audiosketching, audio-drafting and refined hypothesis testing. These three forms of experimentation offer a progressive artistic practice-led approach of a non-linear fashion. Immersive sound technologies are utilized to record, synthesize and spatially position interpretations of the person’s perspectives, experiences and nature. This paper provides an overview of how audio-portrait provide an artistic synthesis of sonic practices resulting in activating sensory responses for a listener that reach beyond the parameters of visual portraiture. This is because 360 immersive and binaural sound-capture technologies can be orchestrated into artistic works that convey unique experiences of space and time. Such work may be designed as a distinctive form of portraiture. Significantly, audio portraiture demonstrates the multidimensionality of wāhine Māori (Māori women) through artistic interpretation and representation in ways that are culturally authentic and unique.
11:20h
A Matter of Notation: Case Studies in Materiality, Temporality, and the Score-Object
Author: Kate Milligan
From a posthuman perspective, music-making can be understood as a lively assemblage of human and non-human agents. Within this framework, the term ‘music culture’ expands to include more-than-human contexts, scales, and temporalities. The question therefore arises: how might composers facilitate musical experiences “beyond the ‘mesoscopic bubble’, within which our human perception and phenomenological considerations are still enclosed”? In this paper, I position the score-object as a subject with material vitality, and an active participant in the balance of agencies in the musical assemblage. Specifically, I employ the notion of “medium time”, as outlined by Georgina Born, to understand how musical objects act independently in and on time. Through material intervention in my notational practice, I assess the balance of these agencies as they arise in musical experiences. More specifically, in this material context, I am continuing an investigation of “watery logics”, incorporating water into my practice as medium (and subject) of primary focus. In this paper, I present two material-compositional case studies from 2023, wherein animated notation is re-mediated by water for generative visual results, resulting in fluid dispersion of musical agency. Finally, I position this discussion within a broader posthuman discourse of ethics.
11:40h
Perfect Information: Scores As Self-Evident Processes
Author: James Saunders
Self-evident processes in music suggest the possibility of close engagement with the operation of a piece, with the potential for empathic and communal experiences to be had by both participants and observers. Taking the notion of perfect and imperfect information in games as a starting point, the paper considers what might be gained by presenting scores as systems of perfect information. In games with perfect or public information, all the necessary information is made available to us, so we have the potential to understand player choices and empathise with them when spectating. In process music, if the necessary information is made available to us, we also have the potential to understand player choices and empathise with them. The paper considers the development of self-evident music in this context, proposing three modes of information delivery: demonstrating, explaining and showing. These modes are considered in relation to the management of information flow and the corresponding cognitive load placed on listeners through the control of speed, density, simultaneity and sequentiality in the presentation of instructions.
12:00h
Egdard Varèse’s Poème électronique. An Analysis of Recently Discovered Sources
Author: Leo Izzo
The article investigates the genesis of Poème électronique by Edgard Varèse, analyzing several previously unknown or overlooked sources, which have been recently identified in the Varèse collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel). The article examines two types of sources: Varèse’s musical manuscripts and the technical plan for the sound spatialization of the entire piece, made by Philips engineers. While Varèse’s sketches and drafts for Poème électronique had been neglected for years, the complete spatialization plan was once thought to be lost but has been recently rediscovered. These new sources reveal a largely unknown, long and complex process of creation, from the first music sketches to the final performance inside the Philips pavilion, a landmark in architecture designed by Le Corbusier for the Brussels Expo in 1958. The article focuses on a short section of the piece, marked by Varèse as section ‘F’, that serves as a case study. Varèse composed this section by merging diagrams for electronic sounds and conventional scores, such as fragments of his unpublished composition Étude pour Espace (1947). The spatialization plan for section ‘F’, coherent with Varèse’s music manuscripts, suggests the vertical movements of drops falling from the ceiling. In future developments of this research, the philological analysis of these different sources, including Varèse’s music sketches and the complete plan for sound spatialization, will be extended to the entire piece. This could lead to a better understanding of this seminal work in electronic music.